Building A Powerful Brand Community on Discord: How to Market to Gen-Z

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Article published in Better Marketing publication.

Read any article about marketing trends for 2021, and chances are they’ll mention the importance of building a community for your brand.

As COVID-19 continues to make in-person connections unadvisable, digital communities are popping up all over the place. Where are these communities? For millennials and up, Facebook groups, Slack and LinkedIn are the hubs for these online spaces. For Gen Z, it’s all about Discord.

What Is Discord?

Often described as Slack for Gen Z, Discord is a messaging platform formed around public or private group chats (or ‘servers’). Originally created for gamers to connect and play with other fans of their favourite games, Discord has recently pivoted to a mass appeal strategy with the new tagline; your place to talk. Now servers are popping up in all areas — from art to beauty to pets — if Gen Z are passionate about it, there are probably Discord servers about it.

Discord servers consist of ‘channels’ based on different topics. Channels are a way to break away from the general group chat into more niche rooms. A server to talk about beauty might have a channel for sharing your social media handles, leaving product reviews, or discussing new launches. A server for the popular game Minecraft might have a channel for sharing your favourite Minecraft Twitch streamers, for voice and video chat while playing, or even channels for talking about other games outside of Minecraft.

With over 100 million active monthly users (source) and brands like HYPEBEAST and Adobe already adopting it into their strategy, Discord could well be the next big thing for marketers.

Why is Discord so popular with Gen Z?

As a ‘Zillennial’, when I think of my early teens on the internet I think of MSN, online chatrooms, and forums dedicated to whatever topic or fandom I was fixating on that week. During my late teens, those platforms disappeared and were replaced by social media, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

These new platforms were about connecting with people you already know, or with unattainable influencers and content creators. Places to connect with strangers over shared interests became few and far between (I’m sure to many parents’ relief), and where they still existed they were often gate-kept by follower counts and tricky algorithms.

Reddit was probably the closest thing to escaping this culture, but many members of Gen Z view Reddit as a toxic place for incels, dudebros, and out-of-touch millennials. Discord is the antithesis of toxic social media culture.

On Discord, follower counts are non-existent, and there’s no algorithm dictating who or what you engage with. The focus is solely on community and connecting with people with shared interests and experiences. For Gen Z that have grown up on the internet during the social media age, it’s a breath of fresh air.

Discord is also a big thing among content creators and influencers. Patreon, a service that lets fans subscribe to creators for exclusive content and perks, has long had the feature to connect a Discord server so that new subscribers get automatically added to it. For creators, Discord is a way to connect with their audience on a direct and personal level, and ultimately encourage paid subscriptions.

I run a Discord server for my podcast with 200 people in, and I’ve found it an invaluable way to get to know our audience, as well as gathering insight into what content, merch, and Patreon perks they’d like to see in the future.

My rule of thumb with marketing is that if creators and influencers are doing something, brands will be next.

So, how can brands use Discord?

One way that brands can use Discord is to create an organic community. It’s important that this community feels like an authentic one — no one wants to join a community that’s obviously a sales tool.

For instance, a beauty brand could opt for channels like ‘skincare tips’, ‘favourite beauty influencers’, and ‘makeup hacks’, as opposed to individual channels about their products. The brand could host special Discord-exclusive events, like Q&As with members of their product development team, exclusive sneak peeks at upcoming launches, and even watch-along film nights of the latest Netflix release.

Not only does this allow for your brand to build a community and ultimately seem more transparent and ‘human’, but it’s an excellent opportunity for market research.

Another way that brands can use Discord is as a private digital-focus group. Sure, marketing reports can make vague assumptions about your target consumer, but is that really the same thing as getting to know them one-on-one?

Brands could recruit members of their target consumer into a private Discord chat, offering a reward of a free product and the ability to influence brand decisions in return for active participation. By chatting directly to your consumer, brands can learn about their likes and dislikes, receive feedback on upcoming campaigns, and even get input into product development.

Discord isn’t without its challenges for brands, however. I can’t name one marketer I know that doesn’t slightly resent the constant influx of new platforms that they’re having to create content for, manage, and work into their marketing strategy.

With resources and budgets increasingly tight for many brands post-COVID, finding the time to community-manage a platform as potentially large as Discord is an impossibility for a lot of brands — not to mention the learning curve involved in getting to grips with it as a platform.

Safe-guarding is another issue — when issuing open invites to your audience, how can you ensure that people of all ages are safe, and how can you keep the community a positive, troll-free space?

Customer service is also another consideration. With brands monitoring every social platform’s comments and DMs, email, and even phone lines to handle customer concerns and queries, is adding another space into the mix something teams can handle?

Conclusion

While Discord isn’t without its challenges and is very much in the early days of adoption by brands, I can see it becoming the next big thing for marketers as strategies shift towards direct communication and two-way conversations with consumers.